


Untitled Unofficial Sequel to Tainted Touch of My Caress

by applecameron



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M, Past Relationship(s), Past Torture, Unofficial Sequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-09
Updated: 2018-01-09
Packaged: 2019-03-02 12:43:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13318353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/applecameron/pseuds/applecameron
Summary: The original in its unfinished form has basically haunted me ever since I read it.  I couldn't quite stick to the original plan articulated with that story (the planned 3 chapters), but I needed something resembling closure.





	Untitled Unofficial Sequel to Tainted Touch of My Caress

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Tainted Touch of My Caress](https://archiveofourown.org/works/833932) by [inaslash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inaslash/pseuds/inaslash). 



The hotel lobby is spacious, full of faux marble, presumably, and the epitome of contemporary Las Vegas. Arthur, looking more disheveled and exhausted the closer Eames gets to him, looks out of place in that way of all discombobulated business travelers, that makes him instantly classifiable as forgettable, just passing through, not of consequence. Arthur is of course none of these things. Up close, he stops looking like a business traveler and starts looking like death warmed over.

"Mr. Hoyt?" Eames extends a hand, allowing his upper class accent to speak for him, as to his character. "Roger Stanhope. Thank you for coming to see me here. Was it a long flight?"

Arthur blinks twice at his hand, then takes it. His reaction time is off, he really is as tired as he looks. "Mr. Stanhope. It was no trouble at all." He stands, and staggers a bit but catches himself. He's wearing a summer-weight ensemble: pale slacks, ivory shirt with some sort of very pale check, and suit jacket. No tie. His top button is undone. 

"Do come up." Eames-as-Stanhope instructs, solicitious. "We'll get room service, it's quieter."

In the elevator, Arthur sags into him, and mutters, "I did it."

"Christ, Arthur, how jet-lagged are you?" Eames catches him about the waist to steady him. "Don't fall."

"I did it. I left straight from the ER. Didn't even pack." 

"What ER?" Eames has them at the door and briefly juggles his armful of Arthur and his keycard. ER. That's the American A&E.

"Dunno what I'm gonna do about the kids." Arthur tells him as if Eames should know what he's talking about, eyes rolling, glassy, fatigue-drunk. "I have no legal claim on them. My sister died in childbirth, you know."

"I did not know." Eames gets him in, gets him plopped in a chair and the door locked. Grabs a water and opens it. Hands it to Arthur, who holds it like he's never seen one before.

"Drink." Eames orders him.

Arthur does, and seems to come back to life. "Stanhope?"

"Yes."

"Is the room - ?" Bugged, he doesn't say.

"Clear." 

"OK." Arthur drinks the rest of the little bottle, and hands Eames the empty. "I left her. She did it..." he holds his side. "Out here, I mean. So, so, _I_ did it. I left her." He looks at Eames like Eames should know what he means. "I don't even...I just left."

And suddenly, Eames does know. He's not here on a job, or anything. Arthur has done it. He's left Mal. He feels a smile spreading that he can't stop. "You _did_ it." Then the rest hits him and his jaw drops. "She - out here? Awake?"

He's crouching in front of Arthur before he finishes, touching Arthur's abdomen through his shirt. He can feel some kind of bandage. "She did this?"

"Yeah."

"And you went to hospital?"

"Dom drove me."

Eames looks up from unbuttoning the shirt button right above Arthur's belt. The man was cut by Mal Cobb, driven to hospital by her husband, whom Eames has possibly never hated more, and then walked out on his own two feet, and, what, hailed an Uber to the airport?

Mind-reader that he's always been, Arthur supplies helpfully, "I took a bus."

"To Las Vegas?" Eames kneels back, having palpated the injury under the gauze and tape, and smelling and detecting no fresh blood. "Did you pay cash?"

Arthur, beautiful, gaunt, escaped, exhausted Arthur, smiles at him indulgently, and fumbles to re-button. "Of course I did."

Eames can't help but smile back. "Of course. Silly of me."

His gaze wanders off for a bit as the fatigue takes over. "Can I - um, "

"Yes. Stay."

"Ok."

Eames helps a stumbling Arthur to the bathroom, listens to make sure he doesn't fall into anything, then tries not to hover as he sits on the bed and takes off his shirt, grimacing, then his shoes. "Just want to sleep for a hundred years," he tells his shoes, then carefully hands them to Eames. 

"The bed's all yours, pet."

Arthur curls up on his uninjured side, Eames lowers the light and retreats to the other side of the suite. His phone is the only tool he needs now.

* * *

Eames calls two inveterate gossips and learns absolutely nothing. Whatever came to a head in California with the Cobbs, it hasn't hit anyone's radar. Good. 

Arthur sleeps deeply a couple of hours, the post-gossip remainder of which Eames spends reading on his tablet and crafting a few emails with exactly the right tone to not trigger suspicion that he's suddenly hunting down Arthur. At one point the man in question wakes but isn't actually awake, for about 10 minutes. Mumbles something again about the kids, what to do about them. Drinks the water Eames hands him, then lays flat on his back and falls asleep again with the empty bottle in his hand.

Eames watches him sleep, open-mouthed, a strip of skin showing between sock and trouser leg, and contemplates calling Dom Cobb. He's unclear what Arthur's preoccupation with the children is. Philippa and James. To his knowledge, Mal has only ever hurt Arthur. Torturing him, in dream. He shies away from the memory of Arthur, trembling, in pain, under her hand. Of the kiss they shared after. 

Keeps his focus on the now.

Hurting him awake is a deviation from her pattern. What other deviation could there be? _Are_ the children in danger? He has no idea what to think right now.

No one in dreamshare would necessarily know it, but Eames likes kids enormously, finds them refreshing. They have no boundaries yet in their world, and are endlessly, unashamedly, creative. It's something he strives for in his own life as an artist. 

He doesn't call. Not yet. But if Arthur doesn't wake up and give him a narrative soon, he knows he will. It's 8 hours or more, he's not sure, by bus, from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Whatever happened isn't happening right now. 

Arthur's sleep turns restless, he starts twitching as Eames rummages through the bag Arthur travelled with, finding a bottle of antibiotics and putting it on the stand by the bed. He watches as the crease between Arthur’s brows deepens and then releases, as he wakes on a single intake of breath.

"Hey." Eames tells him, and Arthur jerks worse, breathing heavy.

"Yeah," Arthur rasps back, finally, sitting up to rub a hand over his face in an almost normal way. Eames hands him the antibiotic bottle. "Ugh. Is there water?"

"Arthur." Eames liberates another bottle from the minifridge and passes it over. Arthur drains most of it quickly. "Are the Cobb children in some kind of danger from their mother." He says it flatly.

Arthur takes a deep breath and weighs some set of factors in his head. Finally, "No. I don't think so." He fumbles with the bottle, and takes a tablet.

"You...want a legal claim on them?" Eames tries out, as he lowers the bottle.

Arthur moves to sit on the side of the bed, one hand on his abdomen, the other braced on his knee, still gripping the now-empty bottle. "I'm their uncle Arthur. I practically raised them the year Mal finished her dissertation. That's how we met, didn't you know that?"

Eames shakes his head.

"Dom hired me to fill in for Mal as research assistant while she was doing her defense," Arthur tells the carpet. "He didn't want his own research to suffer because he couldn't bug her with his crazy ideas while she was writing. Like building a device that lets people share dreams. Philippa was...still in diapers, we were always meeting at the house, and things just…snowballed. I basically lived there for a couple years."

The amount of dreamshare history that just landed in Eames' lap gives him pause. Arthur just looks at him like _don't you know the history of your chosen field?_ but doesn't chastise him. 

"Darling, I knew you were close but not like that." He realizes he never really thought about how it all started, whatever it was, that corrupted into Mal torturing Arthur, literally, in dreams.

Arthur stands, looks at the door. "I should go back."

"NO." The force of Eames' response surprises them both. "No, Arthur, there has to be a better way." He blocks Arthur's path. "Mallorie Cobb tried to hurt you. In the waking world. Darling, that's assault and battery, or something like that."

The look of shock on Arthur's face is almost comical. "I can't -"

"Get her arrested? Get her committed? Isn't that what she needs?"

"I don't-" He sags back onto the bed. 

"Darling. You don't have to decide right now. Look at you. You're done in." He can't believe he has to press the point. The man is ludicrous - goes to all these lengths to escape and wants to turn right around? It's fatigue speaking. Or Stockholm Syndrome, or the like. He wants to just push him down onto the bed and keep him there with one hand. 

Arthur darts a look at him, for one moment that frighteningly efficient point man Eames knows and loves. "Are you on a job?"

Eames shakes his head. "Just scouting some territory, darling. I like this horribly garish little town."

"Of course you do."

"Of course I do." Eames stands and makes for the phone. "Now you're going to eat a meal, and have another kip." He flips through the room service menu and dials. "Then we'll talk."

"I shouldn't-"

Eames turns to face him, before room service picks up. "Yes, you should, Arthur. Yes, you should."


End file.
